Google claims Bing is copying its search results

But angry Google engineers are stomping their feet after discovering that their rivals at Microsoft's Bing may be "cheating" and copying its search results to improve their own.

In fact, according to blog Search Engine Land, Google has become so riled that it even set up an online trap to find out whether its suspicions are correct.

People who misspell a word as they type it into Google's search bar are usually presented with a couple of alternate spellings and search results based on what the firm's algorithms believe they were really looking for. Google prides itself on its spell-correcting abilities for user searches.

But last year, it noticed that there had been a much larger overlap in the results that the two search engines returned following a search for a specific word. And search results for very unique misspelled search words - ones that Google automatically corrected before performing a search - were returning the same corrected results on Bing (see here for some good examples).

All this led Google believe that Bing was (and is) mining Google's own results and then using that data to improve its own results.

To catch Bing in the act, Google created 10 synthetic searches that each used a stream of nonsensical characters, and then artificially placed an unrelated web page as the top search result. Within days, it saw that the same results were now appearing at the top of Bing's pages too. Hmmm, suspicious.

It's entirely legal; in fact it's rather clever, but whether it's fair
is another matter, entirely. And it's upsetting Google to no end.

But Microsoft responded: "We do not copy Google's search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. The overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search so we can provide the most relevant answer to a given query. Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites."

Google uses an eigenvalue system based on the number of links on the page that comes up in the search.. Basically the more links on a page the more likely it will show up.. The algorithm is very public so it wouldn't be hard to copy

craig
on February 3, 2011 2:49 AM

we shouldn't be suprised they've been coping apples interface ideas and design since the original windows and there been no let up.